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The Pied Piper of Hamelin: What Takes the Children? | Whispers From the Dark
In 1284, the children of Hamelin disappeared.
That is the chilling foundation behind one of the world’s most enduring legends: The Pied Piper of Hamelin. But beneath the colorful children’s tale is something much darker—a centuries-old mystery involving a strange man, a broken promise, and a town that may have lost an entire generation.
In this episode of Whispers From the Dark, Jeremy Hanson — The Whisper Man — follows the legend back to medieval Germany and asks the question hidden beneath hundreds of years of folklore:
What really took the children of Hamelin?
Was the Piper simply a character created to explain a forgotten tragedy? Could the story preserve the memory of disease, migration, religious recruitment, war, or another historical catastrophe? Or did something happen in Hamelin so disturbing that generations transformed it into a fairy tale because the truth was harder to remember?
Tonight, we separate documented history from folklore, follow the oldest surviving clues, and descend into the darker theories surrounding the Pied Piper and the missing children of Hamelin.
Some legends begin as stories.
Others begin because something happened.
Whispers From the Dark Hosted by Jeremy Hanson — The Whisper Man
True crime. Unsolved mysteries. Dark history. Urban legends. Paranormal encounters. And the stories that refuse to stay buried.
A Fuzzy Life Entertainment Production.
WEBVTT
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When the lights go out, they speak. The vanished,
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the cursed, the cruel. Their echoes live here.
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I'm Raven Vale, and you've just crossed the threshold.
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Welcome to Whispers from the Dark. Here's the
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story, you know. A town with a rat problem. A
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stranger who solves it. And a council that refuses
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to pay him. A debt collected in children. It's
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a tidy story, and a beginning, and a middle,
00:01:10.379 --> 00:01:13.420
a moroi, and a villain who was provoked into
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it. Eh, you can tell it to a child at bedtime.
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and people have for hundreds of years. Not one
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piece of it is the oldest to count. Not one.
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No rats, no fee, no wrong done to him at all.
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What the record says is that on the 26th of June,
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in the year where 1284, a young man crossed the
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bridges into a town in Lower Saxony. and came
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through the west gate. He was about 30. He was
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handsome by accounts, well -dressed, and everyone
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who saw him were marked on it. He began to play
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a silver pipe, and 130 children walked out the
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east gate behind him, past the place where the
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town hung people, and they were never seen again.
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That is the whole account. No reason, no rhyme,
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none is given. None. He was not owed anything.
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He had not cheated. He didn't want money and
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he never asked for any. He came and he played
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and he just took them. The rats, the rats of
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the story, arrived 275 years later. Somebody
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put them there. So, who was the victim? There
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are 130 of them and not one of them has a name.
00:03:00.300 --> 00:03:05.979
Not a name. Not an age. No faces. The record
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gives a number and stops. What we have is the
00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:15.800
town. Hamlin sits on the River Wesser in Lower
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Saxony in what was then the Diocese of Minden.
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In 1284, it was a market town of a few thousand
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people, walked and prosperous enough with a grain
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trade and a market church and a set of gates
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and it was closed at night. It was the kind of
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place where everybody knew whose children were
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whose. Midsummer, when this happened, was the
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biggest week of the year. The feasts of the Saints
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John and Paul. The 26th of June bonfires and
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processions. The town outdoors together, in the
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longest night that light would get. That is what
00:04:02.159 --> 00:04:08.599
the children walked out of. Hamelin in 1284 was
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crowded. And it ran on primal genture. The eldest
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son took the land, everybody else took nothing.
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Which meant a market town in Lower Saxony which
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was full of young people in their teens and twenties
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with no inheritance coming. No ground of their
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own and no particular reason to stay. Second
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sons and second daughters. Young people with
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nothing coming to them. Four generations afterwards,
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Hamlin dated its official documents from the
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year that children left. Not from the birth of
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Christ, not from the reign of terror of an emperor,
00:04:51.800 --> 00:04:56.620
from the year that it happened. In town, grain
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merchants and clerks and notaries reset its calendars.
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Every contract, every deed, every ordinary piece
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of civic paperwork. carried the wound in the
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dateline. A man buying a house in 1330 wrote
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down that it was 46 years since the children.
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You do not do that to remember something. You
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do that because you cannot stop. The day everything
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changed, the 26th of June, 1284. The oldest folktale
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inputs him coming from the west, over the bridges
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on foot. A young man, thirty or so, in the account
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as careful to say that he was good looking and
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his clothes were fine. If people look for that
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only because of it. He doesn't knock on a door.
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He doesn't ask for the council. He does not present
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himself to anybody. He walks in the middle of
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a town in its busiest hour in its busiest week
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and starts to play. In the pipe. The pipe is
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silver and the account says so twice. And the
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children come. Not driven, not carried, not taken
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from anywhere. They hear a sound and they come
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out of that house and out of the market and off
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the church steps and they fall behind him and
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they go 130 of them He does not lead out the
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way he came He crosses the whole town West gate
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to East gate Which means he walks them the long
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way in the open through every street and hamlet
00:07:05.350 --> 00:07:09.709
and daylight in front of everybody. Nobody stops
00:07:09.709 --> 00:07:16.089
him. A stranger walks 130 children through a
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walled tunnel and broad daylight at the height
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of a religious feast. In the entire record, there
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is not one man who stops into the road. The East
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Gate to down the road. to the place of execution.
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The Loonbird transcript is specific about that
00:07:40.509 --> 00:07:44.910
and almost nobody uses it. Because the hillside
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is prettier and the children were lost at the
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calvary, the gallows ground, the killing field,
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the patch outside the wall where the town did
00:07:57.089 --> 00:08:02.310
what towns did. That's where the trail ends.
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Past the gallows and gone. The mothers cried
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and went out after them. The account says they
00:08:10.910 --> 00:08:14.310
ran from town to town asking and they found nothing.
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Now what we know, everything I told you comes
00:08:24.189 --> 00:08:27.750
from four things. And the floor under it is a
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little thin. First class, around the year 1300,
00:08:33.820 --> 00:08:38.179
16 years after. Someone put a window in the market
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church at Hamlin showing the piper and the children.
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It stood there for three and a half centuries
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and it was destroyed by 1660. And we only know
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what it was because people had copied it down
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and it was still there. A man in colored clothes.
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children around him, the hill. 16 years. That's
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the gap between the event and the memorial. Close
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enough that people who were alive that day were
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alive when it went in and looked at it, and said
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nothing to correct it. Somebody paid for that
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window. Glass was cheap and the church glass
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was commissioned. Buddy. Somebody in Hamlin decided
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that this was the thing the church should show.
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And other people, they agreed. And it stayed
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up through 360 years of services. Weddings and
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funerals until it was gone. The second is a line
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in the town chronicle. written in 1384. It says
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it's been 100 years since the children left,
00:10:02.450 --> 00:10:09.070
and that's the entire entry. The third is the
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Nuremberg's manuscript, from around 1440 to 1450,
00:10:14.509 --> 00:10:18.389
which gives the date and the feast day, the piper
00:10:18.389 --> 00:10:21.190
in many colors and the number and the place of
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execution. And the fourth, the fourth is stone.
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In 1556, Tom built the new gate and carved it
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into it, and it stood for 270 years after the
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sorcerer let 130 children out. In 1602, the front
00:10:42.639 --> 00:10:46.139
of the house went up with the same date, the
00:10:46.139 --> 00:10:50.320
same number, the same man in his colored clothes,
00:10:50.860 --> 00:10:55.259
and the flat statement that a... They disappeared
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forever. And that, that is the whole evidentiary
00:11:01.500 --> 00:11:05.659
basis. A destroyed window, a one -line chronicle
00:11:05.659 --> 00:11:11.059
entry in a manuscript and some masonry. An unfortunate
00:11:11.059 --> 00:11:15.019
position. Certainly for anyone who wants a conclusion.
00:11:15.899 --> 00:11:20.889
And yet... Every one of those sources spread
00:11:20.889 --> 00:11:26.789
across 325 years and four different materials
00:11:26.789 --> 00:11:34.330
agrees on the date. The 26th of June. The Feast
00:11:34.330 --> 00:11:41.850
of Saints John and Paul. 1284. Hmm. Towns invent
00:11:41.850 --> 00:11:45.740
things all the time. Towns do not usually keep
00:11:45.740 --> 00:11:54.620
the same appointment for three centuries. Hmm,
00:11:55.379 --> 00:11:59.580
the evidence. The strongest evidence in this
00:11:59.580 --> 00:12:02.299
case isn't on the document, it's the street.
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It runs through the old town and it's called
00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:10.799
Buja Nastrasse. And the name means roughly the
00:12:10.799 --> 00:12:14.360
street without drums. The children were soon
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to have walked around this road all their way
00:12:17.340 --> 00:12:21.419
to the East Gate. And for centuries in that one
00:12:21.419 --> 00:12:26.720
street, Hamlet did not permit music. No drums,
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no dancing, no playing. It's a wedding party
00:12:31.100 --> 00:12:33.840
come through, fell silent at one end and picked
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up on the other. A funeral procession went through
00:12:37.500 --> 00:12:42.620
with one note. It's a strange kind of evidence.
00:12:43.159 --> 00:12:47.179
It's not a story. A story is cheap and story
00:12:47.179 --> 00:12:52.019
drifts one way or the other. This is more enforcement.
00:12:53.659 --> 00:12:56.799
The town made a rule and they kept the rule and
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passed the rule to the children who passed it
00:12:59.259 --> 00:13:02.179
to their children in a thing that happened to
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people none of them had ever met. Silence maintained
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by ordinance. For hundreds of years and 150 yards
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of road, a town does not do that to a legend.
00:13:23.039 --> 00:13:27.860
That's how a town treats a grave. And the rule
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doesn't protect the memory of the children, it
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bans the thing that took them. Hamlin did not
00:13:38.299 --> 00:13:42.360
forget the celebration on that street. Hamlin
00:13:42.360 --> 00:13:47.360
forbid the music. And the calendar in the gates
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because it was not one inscription. It was 1556
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and then 1602 and more besides, one facade after
00:13:57.639 --> 00:14:02.370
the other. The same date re -carved by generation
00:14:02.370 --> 00:14:05.129
after generation of people who could have let
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it go and they did not. Hamelin had every reason
00:14:10.190 --> 00:14:15.570
to stop. Nothing in this helped them. It was
00:14:15.570 --> 00:14:18.850
not good to trade to be the town that lost its
00:14:18.850 --> 00:14:23.629
children. There was no shrine and no relic. No
00:14:23.629 --> 00:14:28.809
pilgrim money in it. I kept saying it anyways.
00:14:29.950 --> 00:14:34.590
For seven hundred years. And they're still saying
00:14:34.590 --> 00:14:46.090
it now. Whatever happened on that road, the people
00:14:46.090 --> 00:14:48.610
who lived it never once behaved as it thought
00:14:48.610 --> 00:15:01.309
it had not. The shadows. The Piper, then. And
00:15:01.309 --> 00:15:06.669
here for once. I do not have to be careful. There's
00:15:06.669 --> 00:15:09.830
no family. There's no man who was suspected and
00:15:09.830 --> 00:15:14.750
just never charged. There is nobody alive who
00:15:14.750 --> 00:15:20.190
can hurt by me saying the thing out loud. Hmm,
00:15:20.230 --> 00:15:24.000
you've been given a monster. He hunched things
00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:28.299
in rags, a crooked flute, and a face built to
00:15:28.299 --> 00:15:34.559
frighten children. Just put it away. It was never
00:15:34.559 --> 00:15:39.740
there. He is described in the same way in every
00:15:39.740 --> 00:15:44.460
source. Across 300 years. And the description
00:15:44.460 --> 00:15:47.720
does not vary. Young and handsome and well dressed
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in many colors. The detail is not decoration
00:15:53.190 --> 00:15:58.710
in the 13th century. Motley, cloth maybe mixed
00:15:58.710 --> 00:16:02.830
in divided colors, was worn by people who stood
00:16:02.830 --> 00:16:07.009
outside the ordinary order of things. Players
00:16:07.009 --> 00:16:11.129
and gestures and the traveling in the unplaceable.
00:16:12.570 --> 00:16:15.409
A man in motley was marked as neither one thing
00:16:15.409 --> 00:16:17.950
nor the other and every single account of it
00:16:17.950 --> 00:16:24.440
leads with it. He does not speak. None of the
00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:26.940
earliest versions does he say a single word.
00:16:28.159 --> 00:16:30.960
He makes no demand and he issues no threat and
00:16:30.960 --> 00:16:37.159
offers no terms. He is not frightening. He is
00:16:37.159 --> 00:16:43.220
beautiful, rich, which is worse. And he did not
00:16:43.220 --> 00:16:45.879
have to raise his voice because he never needed
00:16:45.879 --> 00:16:50.909
anything the adults at all had. The instrument
00:16:50.909 --> 00:16:56.289
is silver, which is not what a traveling piper
00:16:56.289 --> 00:17:00.389
in 1284 is carrying. A working musician would
00:17:00.389 --> 00:17:03.990
have had wood. Silver is the medal of churches
00:17:03.990 --> 00:17:07.390
and reliquaries, and the things that you are
00:17:07.390 --> 00:17:10.009
not supposed to touch, and yet in there it is
00:17:10.009 --> 00:17:14.670
the day he chose. Midsummer is the end of the
00:17:14.670 --> 00:17:18.789
year. The point where the light stops climbing
00:17:18.789 --> 00:17:23.630
and starts to go. Every culture that's ever lived
00:17:23.630 --> 00:17:28.910
at this latitude is treated as a threshold. A
00:17:28.910 --> 00:17:31.450
night when the wall between things is supposed
00:17:31.450 --> 00:17:35.630
to be thin. He didn't come in February. He came
00:17:35.630 --> 00:17:38.529
in the one evening in the calendar when the whole
00:17:38.529 --> 00:17:41.369
town was outside and the boundary was already
00:17:41.369 --> 00:17:47.759
open. You see, he crosses running water to get
00:17:47.759 --> 00:17:52.119
in. He arrives at the exact end of the year at
00:17:52.119 --> 00:17:58.240
Midsummer on feast day. He plays once. He is
00:17:58.240 --> 00:18:01.160
answered only by children and all the children
00:18:01.160 --> 00:18:05.079
and by nothing else in town. He takes them past
00:18:05.079 --> 00:18:10.339
the gallows. Not up the pretty hill. Past the
00:18:10.339 --> 00:18:13.720
place where the town killed people Over a ground
00:18:13.720 --> 00:18:16.000
that everybody in Hamelin already understood
00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:20.680
to be grounds who don't go on Then the road ends
00:18:20.680 --> 00:18:26.799
and there's nothing Later tellings soften it
00:18:26.799 --> 00:18:30.240
They give him a mountain that opens and closes
00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:33.740
They give him three children left behind one
00:18:33.740 --> 00:18:37.880
lame one blind one deaf And somebody survives
00:18:37.880 --> 00:18:40.839
to explain it. So the story has a witness of
00:18:40.839 --> 00:18:43.700
the audience and it has a mercy. And the oldest
00:18:43.700 --> 00:18:46.220
version has no survivors and no explanation.
00:18:47.880 --> 00:18:52.039
It is a stranger and a sound and an empty road.
00:19:02.269 --> 00:19:04.890
Regeneration is trying to solve this and the
00:19:04.890 --> 00:19:09.150
two explanations are Genuinely good. The best
00:19:09.150 --> 00:19:14.130
is immigration In the 13th century that German
00:19:14.130 --> 00:19:19.190
lands were pushing east into Moronia, Paraninia,
00:19:19.670 --> 00:19:22.970
Transylvania, Brandenburg and the recruiters
00:19:22.970 --> 00:19:27.369
who ran it were in a location called No Kidders
00:19:28.319 --> 00:19:31.599
The locator arrived in a crowded town, promised
00:19:31.599 --> 00:19:34.240
land, and left with as many young people as he
00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:38.220
could sign. He was paid to be persuasive. He
00:19:38.220 --> 00:19:41.680
dressed well, because the cross -breast was his
00:19:41.680 --> 00:19:49.839
job. And the children of Hamlin? Hm. No, they
00:19:49.839 --> 00:19:53.359
may never admit children at all. could have been
00:19:53.359 --> 00:19:55.940
the town's people, its sons and its daughters,
00:19:56.299 --> 00:19:59.500
the way we still go and stay the sons of a place.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:06.440
So... A well -dressed stranger arrives, makes
00:20:06.440 --> 00:20:10.740
an offer, and leaves with 130 of the young, and
00:20:10.740 --> 00:20:16.119
they go east. And they're never heard from again,
00:20:16.579 --> 00:20:19.779
because in 1284, going east is functionally the
00:20:19.779 --> 00:20:25.359
same as... dying. And nobody comes back to see
00:20:25.359 --> 00:20:30.680
how it turned out. That fits almost everything.
00:20:31.700 --> 00:20:34.359
It fits the clothes, and the number, and the
00:20:34.359 --> 00:20:38.420
direction, and the complete silence afterwards.
00:20:39.980 --> 00:20:43.200
It's not only plausible, there's evidence, and
00:20:43.200 --> 00:20:46.099
evidence is better than the theory even deserves.
00:20:47.940 --> 00:20:52.789
A linguist named Jürgen Judith Took Evgeny's
00:20:52.789 --> 00:20:56.089
family name and recorded it in Hamelin. At the
00:20:56.089 --> 00:20:58.589
time, he went looking for those names somewhere
00:20:58.589 --> 00:21:02.609
else. He found them clustered with what he called
00:21:02.609 --> 00:21:06.970
amazing frequency. In Pregnance, in Ukra Marka,
00:21:07.069 --> 00:21:10.089
North of Berlin, and again that was Pomerania,
00:21:10.329 --> 00:21:15.089
is now owned. And then he did the same thing
00:21:15.089 --> 00:21:20.990
with places. There is a burvagan south of Hamelin.
00:21:21.369 --> 00:21:25.809
There is a Peruvian northwest of Berlin. There
00:21:25.809 --> 00:21:30.829
is a Peruvian near Stuttgart in Poland. Five
00:21:30.829 --> 00:21:33.250
villages called Hindenburg run in a line from
00:21:33.250 --> 00:21:36.650
Westphalia to Pomerania. There are three separate
00:21:36.650 --> 00:21:40.390
eastern Spielbergs. Hommelspring sits behind
00:21:40.390 --> 00:21:43.230
St. Hamelin and Hommelspring sits in the Jügelmark,
00:21:43.789 --> 00:21:51.579
400 miles away. Hmm. The news went east. Somebody.
00:21:52.619 --> 00:21:57.440
Somebody carried them. The timing works well.
00:21:58.279 --> 00:22:02.740
The Danes lost that Bahamian in 1227. The land
00:22:02.740 --> 00:22:05.319
south of the Baltic came open and the bishops
00:22:05.319 --> 00:22:07.640
and dukes of Pomerania and Brandenburg began
00:22:07.640 --> 00:22:12.240
sending locators out to fill them. Thousands
00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:16.019
of young adults from Lower Saxony and West Valley
00:22:16.019 --> 00:22:20.950
haunted exactly this period. Back in Hamelin
00:22:20.950 --> 00:22:24.410
there was a town full of second zones with no
00:22:24.410 --> 00:22:28.829
land coming. There is an even darker version
00:22:28.829 --> 00:22:32.690
of it. Some have suggested the young Hamelins
00:22:32.690 --> 00:22:37.450
were not recruited but sold, handed to a poultice
00:22:37.450 --> 00:22:40.849
agent. Which would explain why no town on earth
00:22:40.849 --> 00:22:42.890
would write down what actually had happened to
00:22:42.890 --> 00:22:48.559
them. The second is a children's crusade. one
00:22:48.559 --> 00:22:52.119
of the recurring waves of religious enthusiasm
00:22:52.119 --> 00:22:54.660
that pulled the young out of the European towns
00:22:54.660 --> 00:22:57.079
and marched them off to be sold or drowned or
00:22:57.079 --> 00:23:05.779
lost. And then, the weaker ones. Hmm. Plague.
00:23:07.180 --> 00:23:11.460
Plague, which, hmm, does not work, because the
00:23:11.460 --> 00:23:15.900
Black Death is 60 years out. A landslide on...
00:23:15.839 --> 00:23:19.940
a dancing mania of the sort that did sweep the
00:23:19.940 --> 00:23:24.380
Rhino and drowning in the Weezer. Each of them
00:23:24.380 --> 00:23:27.980
explains part of it. None of them explained why
00:23:27.980 --> 00:23:30.779
a town would encode a recruitment drive in a
00:23:30.779 --> 00:23:34.940
stained glass window and forbid music on a stream
00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:39.359
for 400 years because of an economic migration.
00:23:41.500 --> 00:23:45.829
If your sons and daughters... Sign a contract
00:23:45.829 --> 00:23:50.369
and walk east to take up farmland in Brandenburg
00:23:50.369 --> 00:23:53.869
It's a hard year and a lot of empty chairs. It's
00:23:53.869 --> 00:23:57.750
not a thing you can carve into a gate in 1556
00:23:57.750 --> 00:24:01.490
It's not a thing you put in a church. You do
00:24:01.490 --> 00:24:08.650
not ban dancing over immigration So we have a
00:24:08.650 --> 00:24:13.069
shelf of theories that account for The disappearance,
00:24:13.529 --> 00:24:19.029
and not one of them accounts for the town, which
00:24:19.029 --> 00:24:27.970
is, I suppose, less than ideal. 700 years of
00:24:27.970 --> 00:24:31.589
scholarship, and the best way we can say is that
00:24:31.589 --> 00:24:35.490
130 children left by a gate and something about
00:24:35.490 --> 00:24:43.950
it was worth banning music over. That families
00:24:43.950 --> 00:24:49.230
fight There is no family in this episode There
00:24:49.230 --> 00:24:51.730
is a town and the town has been fighting for
00:24:51.730 --> 00:24:57.410
700 years And it's been fighting a very very
00:24:57.410 --> 00:25:00.710
specific thing. It has been fighting the absence
00:25:00.710 --> 00:25:07.430
of a reason The earliest sources give this them
00:25:07.430 --> 00:25:13.210
a man He played, the children went, nothing forward,
00:25:13.490 --> 00:25:17.490
nothing explaining it. No grievance and no provocation.
00:25:18.230 --> 00:25:20.609
A hundred and thirty children taken for no cause
00:25:20.609 --> 00:25:27.930
at all. The town did nothing wrong. Nobody can
00:25:27.930 --> 00:25:34.990
live inside that. Somewhere in the 16th century
00:25:34.990 --> 00:25:42.130
the rats appear. The first mention of them comes
00:25:42.130 --> 00:25:47.930
in 1559, 275 years after the fact, which has
00:25:47.930 --> 00:25:51.269
coined a long time to sit in an unpaid invoice.
00:25:52.869 --> 00:25:57.009
Somebody, somebody found it. Somebody filed it.
00:25:57.230 --> 00:26:01.849
Somebody decided in the range of the Charles
00:26:01.849 --> 00:26:06.130
V that what the whole business had been missing
00:26:06.130 --> 00:26:11.140
was simply a receipt. The rat comes with a contract.
00:26:11.740 --> 00:26:14.980
With the contract comes a fee. With the fee comes
00:26:14.980 --> 00:26:18.460
a town council that refuses to pay it. And with
00:26:18.460 --> 00:26:24.019
that refusal, finally, at long last, comes...
00:26:24.019 --> 00:26:29.480
a reason. It makes the piper man with the motive
00:26:29.480 --> 00:26:32.980
instead of thing with none It makes a loss consequence
00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:35.059
instead of an accident and it makes the town
00:26:35.059 --> 00:26:38.079
guilty which sounds like the worst outcome and
00:26:38.079 --> 00:26:42.660
is In fact the most comforting one available
00:26:42.660 --> 00:26:47.799
Because guilt means agency and guilt means We
00:26:47.799 --> 00:26:50.680
could have prevented it guilt means it will not
00:26:50.680 --> 00:26:53.700
happen to you. So as long as you pay what you
00:26:53.700 --> 00:27:03.220
owe The rats were not a decoration on this story.
00:27:04.259 --> 00:27:07.660
They were a defense against it. And they were
00:27:07.660 --> 00:27:11.500
sitting right there to be picked up. Hamlin was
00:27:11.500 --> 00:27:15.119
a milling town on a river, which means Hamlin
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:19.279
had rats, which means Hamlin had rat catchers.
00:27:20.619 --> 00:27:23.220
And a rat catcher is a man that you admire and
00:27:23.220 --> 00:27:27.640
you haggle with and try not to overpay. The town
00:27:27.640 --> 00:27:30.680
took the most ordinary transaction in its own
00:27:30.680 --> 00:27:33.759
daily life and welded it into the worst day in
00:27:33.759 --> 00:27:45.380
history. And the joint held for 400 years. Hanuman
00:27:45.380 --> 00:27:49.579
was handed over and spent three centuries building
00:27:49.579 --> 00:27:53.619
a door onto it. And the door has a moral on it.
00:27:53.660 --> 00:27:57.750
And the moral is sell your debts. So yes, the
00:27:57.750 --> 00:28:04.710
town owed a bill. And something, something terrible
00:28:04.710 --> 00:28:09.730
came and collected. The rest of it's even worse.
00:28:11.789 --> 00:28:15.990
Nobody, nobody in 1284 ever said what the bill
00:28:15.990 --> 00:28:21.049
was for. There's no contract anywhere in the
00:28:21.049 --> 00:28:25.490
record. There's no fee, there's no service rendered,
00:28:25.650 --> 00:28:30.509
and there's no name on the invoice. It was drawn
00:28:30.509 --> 00:28:36.730
up to 175 years after the payment had already
00:28:36.730 --> 00:28:42.089
been taken by men who were not born when it happened
00:28:42.089 --> 00:28:45.589
to account for a charge that nobody could explain
00:28:45.589 --> 00:28:49.039
and nobody could even bear. They did not pay
00:28:49.039 --> 00:28:52.180
the piper. They paid first and then at their
00:28:52.180 --> 00:29:04.319
leisure. They wrote the bill I have spent this
00:29:04.319 --> 00:29:11.859
hour Taking the rats away from them and it leaves
00:29:11.859 --> 00:29:16.009
a hundred and thirty children with No names,
00:29:16.349 --> 00:29:20.230
no ages, no faces, and no reason. I walked out
00:29:20.230 --> 00:29:25.250
of the gate in the summer of 1284. My beautiful
00:29:25.250 --> 00:29:28.309
young man in colored clothes who wanted nothing
00:29:28.309 --> 00:29:31.410
and said nothing and was never seen before or
00:29:31.410 --> 00:29:36.670
after. Hmm, the bedtime version is just kinder.
00:29:37.210 --> 00:29:40.349
The bedtime version at least has a lesson in
00:29:40.349 --> 00:29:49.039
it. Hmm. I took the lesson out. The only thing
00:29:49.039 --> 00:29:53.000
I can say for that is that it is what Hamlin
00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:57.619
said first, before anyone tidied it, when there
00:29:57.619 --> 00:30:00.579
was still someone alive who had been standing
00:30:00.579 --> 00:30:10.160
in that street. Hmm, the street. The street is
00:30:10.160 --> 00:30:17.559
still there. Bunjilastras. It still runs through
00:30:17.559 --> 00:30:20.319
the old town, and the buildings along it haven't
00:30:20.319 --> 00:30:23.339
changed. The ordinance has gone, and the tour
00:30:23.339 --> 00:30:25.559
groups come through it now, with thousands of
00:30:25.559 --> 00:30:30.880
the guide talking the whole way. Rottenthanger
00:30:30.880 --> 00:30:35.500
House is still standing, and the inscription
00:30:35.500 --> 00:30:39.400
is still in front of it, and it still pays 130
00:30:39.400 --> 00:30:44.509
children. and it still says that they've disappeared
00:30:44.509 --> 00:30:50.369
forever. The window is gone and burned or fell
00:30:50.369 --> 00:30:54.809
or was broken out sometime before 1660. And all
00:30:54.809 --> 00:30:57.410
that's left is a copy of a copy of something
00:30:57.410 --> 00:31:00.349
that a man once drew while standing in front
00:31:00.349 --> 00:31:04.470
of a church. Looking up at a piece of colored
00:31:04.470 --> 00:31:09.049
glass that somebody's something paid for. 16
00:31:09.049 --> 00:31:11.950
years after, while it was still fresh enough
00:31:11.950 --> 00:31:17.750
to, hmm, remember... The wester still runs past
00:31:17.750 --> 00:31:21.470
the town. The gates are gone, and the rural east
00:31:21.470 --> 00:31:24.950
is the rural east. And there are towns at the
00:31:24.950 --> 00:31:27.269
far end of it where family names are the ones
00:31:27.269 --> 00:31:33.529
that used to be in... Hamlin. Nobody in either
00:31:33.529 --> 00:31:39.019
place thinks about it. The execution ground is
00:31:39.019 --> 00:31:41.839
not marked. Nothing stands where the trail stops.
00:31:43.279 --> 00:31:46.000
You could walk over this afternoon and not know.
00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:49.819
Which is true most of the ground any of us walk
00:31:49.819 --> 00:31:55.640
over today. And every June 26th, an animalman,
00:31:55.640 --> 00:31:59.559
they put on the play. They dress a man in motley
00:31:59.559 --> 00:32:03.140
and give him a pint. And the children of the
00:32:03.140 --> 00:32:06.019
town following through the streets laughing in
00:32:06.019 --> 00:32:10.579
costume for the visitors out through the town
00:32:10.579 --> 00:32:23.839
The way they went 742 years and the town Still
00:32:23.839 --> 00:32:27.259
can't stop seeing and it still does not know
00:32:27.259 --> 00:32:32.109
what it's saying a stranger came In midsummer,
00:32:33.089 --> 00:32:40.490
he played once, and Hamlin has been playing ever
00:32:40.490 --> 00:32:41.069
since.
00:00:07.919 --> 00:00:12.699
When the lights go out, they speak. The vanished,
00:00:13.140 --> 00:00:17.120
the cursed, the cruel. Their echoes live here.
00:00:17.780 --> 00:00:21.339
I'm Raven Vale, and you've just crossed the threshold.
00:00:22.280 --> 00:00:51.619
Welcome to Whispers from the Dark. Here's the
00:00:51.619 --> 00:00:57.000
story, you know. A town with a rat problem. A
00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.479
stranger who solves it. And a council that refuses
00:01:01.479 --> 00:01:07.840
to pay him. A debt collected in children. It's
00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:10.280
a tidy story, and a beginning, and a middle,
00:01:10.379 --> 00:01:13.420
a moroi, and a villain who was provoked into
00:01:13.420 --> 00:01:17.739
it. Eh, you can tell it to a child at bedtime.
00:01:18.219 --> 00:01:23.459
and people have for hundreds of years. Not one
00:01:23.459 --> 00:01:26.739
piece of it is the oldest to count. Not one.
00:01:27.739 --> 00:01:31.840
No rats, no fee, no wrong done to him at all.
00:01:33.680 --> 00:01:37.659
What the record says is that on the 26th of June,
00:01:38.379 --> 00:01:43.060
in the year where 1284, a young man crossed the
00:01:43.060 --> 00:01:46.760
bridges into a town in Lower Saxony. and came
00:01:46.760 --> 00:01:51.939
through the west gate. He was about 30. He was
00:01:51.939 --> 00:01:56.859
handsome by accounts, well -dressed, and everyone
00:01:56.859 --> 00:02:01.299
who saw him were marked on it. He began to play
00:02:01.299 --> 00:02:06.840
a silver pipe, and 130 children walked out the
00:02:06.840 --> 00:02:11.139
east gate behind him, past the place where the
00:02:11.139 --> 00:02:15.419
town hung people, and they were never seen again.
00:02:16.460 --> 00:02:21.120
That is the whole account. No reason, no rhyme,
00:02:21.259 --> 00:02:27.139
none is given. None. He was not owed anything.
00:02:27.280 --> 00:02:31.180
He had not cheated. He didn't want money and
00:02:31.180 --> 00:02:35.020
he never asked for any. He came and he played
00:02:35.020 --> 00:02:39.740
and he just took them. The rats, the rats of
00:02:39.740 --> 00:02:46.080
the story, arrived 275 years later. Somebody
00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:55.639
put them there. So, who was the victim? There
00:02:55.639 --> 00:02:59.360
are 130 of them and not one of them has a name.
00:03:00.300 --> 00:03:05.979
Not a name. Not an age. No faces. The record
00:03:05.979 --> 00:03:11.000
gives a number and stops. What we have is the
00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:15.800
town. Hamlin sits on the River Wesser in Lower
00:03:15.800 --> 00:03:21.000
Saxony in what was then the Diocese of Minden.
00:03:21.900 --> 00:03:24.840
In 1284, it was a market town of a few thousand
00:03:24.840 --> 00:03:28.039
people, walked and prosperous enough with a grain
00:03:28.039 --> 00:03:30.460
trade and a market church and a set of gates
00:03:30.460 --> 00:03:34.979
and it was closed at night. It was the kind of
00:03:34.979 --> 00:03:37.780
place where everybody knew whose children were
00:03:37.780 --> 00:03:42.979
whose. Midsummer, when this happened, was the
00:03:42.979 --> 00:03:46.800
biggest week of the year. The feasts of the Saints
00:03:46.800 --> 00:03:51.960
John and Paul. The 26th of June bonfires and
00:03:51.960 --> 00:03:57.740
processions. The town outdoors together, in the
00:03:57.740 --> 00:04:02.159
longest night that light would get. That is what
00:04:02.159 --> 00:04:08.599
the children walked out of. Hamelin in 1284 was
00:04:08.599 --> 00:04:14.199
crowded. And it ran on primal genture. The eldest
00:04:14.199 --> 00:04:16.939
son took the land, everybody else took nothing.
00:04:18.259 --> 00:04:21.420
Which meant a market town in Lower Saxony which
00:04:21.420 --> 00:04:24.319
was full of young people in their teens and twenties
00:04:24.319 --> 00:04:28.860
with no inheritance coming. No ground of their
00:04:28.860 --> 00:04:33.120
own and no particular reason to stay. Second
00:04:33.120 --> 00:04:36.639
sons and second daughters. Young people with
00:04:36.639 --> 00:04:41.180
nothing coming to them. Four generations afterwards,
00:04:41.519 --> 00:04:44.259
Hamlin dated its official documents from the
00:04:44.259 --> 00:04:47.819
year that children left. Not from the birth of
00:04:47.819 --> 00:04:50.879
Christ, not from the reign of terror of an emperor,
00:04:51.800 --> 00:04:56.620
from the year that it happened. In town, grain
00:04:56.620 --> 00:05:00.540
merchants and clerks and notaries reset its calendars.
00:05:01.439 --> 00:05:04.699
Every contract, every deed, every ordinary piece
00:05:04.699 --> 00:05:07.889
of civic paperwork. carried the wound in the
00:05:07.889 --> 00:05:12.529
dateline. A man buying a house in 1330 wrote
00:05:12.529 --> 00:05:16.430
down that it was 46 years since the children.
00:05:17.930 --> 00:05:22.509
You do not do that to remember something. You
00:05:22.509 --> 00:05:31.610
do that because you cannot stop. The day everything
00:05:31.610 --> 00:05:40.360
changed, the 26th of June, 1284. The oldest folktale
00:05:40.360 --> 00:05:44.759
inputs him coming from the west, over the bridges
00:05:44.759 --> 00:05:49.939
on foot. A young man, thirty or so, in the account
00:05:49.939 --> 00:05:52.819
as careful to say that he was good looking and
00:05:52.819 --> 00:05:56.980
his clothes were fine. If people look for that
00:05:56.980 --> 00:06:01.259
only because of it. He doesn't knock on a door.
00:06:01.839 --> 00:06:06.199
He doesn't ask for the council. He does not present
00:06:06.199 --> 00:06:10.879
himself to anybody. He walks in the middle of
00:06:10.879 --> 00:06:14.620
a town in its busiest hour in its busiest week
00:06:14.620 --> 00:06:21.339
and starts to play. In the pipe. The pipe is
00:06:21.339 --> 00:06:25.639
silver and the account says so twice. And the
00:06:25.639 --> 00:06:32.000
children come. Not driven, not carried, not taken
00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:36.410
from anywhere. They hear a sound and they come
00:06:36.410 --> 00:06:39.629
out of that house and out of the market and off
00:06:39.629 --> 00:06:43.170
the church steps and they fall behind him and
00:06:43.170 --> 00:06:51.629
they go 130 of them He does not lead out the
00:06:51.629 --> 00:06:57.029
way he came He crosses the whole town West gate
00:06:57.029 --> 00:07:01.149
to East gate Which means he walks them the long
00:07:01.149 --> 00:07:05.350
way in the open through every street and hamlet
00:07:05.350 --> 00:07:09.709
and daylight in front of everybody. Nobody stops
00:07:09.709 --> 00:07:16.089
him. A stranger walks 130 children through a
00:07:16.089 --> 00:07:18.990
walled tunnel and broad daylight at the height
00:07:18.990 --> 00:07:23.470
of a religious feast. In the entire record, there
00:07:23.470 --> 00:07:29.490
is not one man who stops into the road. The East
00:07:29.490 --> 00:07:34.790
Gate to down the road. to the place of execution.
00:07:37.430 --> 00:07:40.509
The Loonbird transcript is specific about that
00:07:40.509 --> 00:07:44.910
and almost nobody uses it. Because the hillside
00:07:44.910 --> 00:07:47.949
is prettier and the children were lost at the
00:07:47.949 --> 00:07:53.110
calvary, the gallows ground, the killing field,
00:07:54.250 --> 00:07:57.089
the patch outside the wall where the town did
00:07:57.089 --> 00:08:02.310
what towns did. That's where the trail ends.
00:08:03.110 --> 00:08:07.490
Past the gallows and gone. The mothers cried
00:08:07.490 --> 00:08:10.910
and went out after them. The account says they
00:08:10.910 --> 00:08:14.310
ran from town to town asking and they found nothing.
00:08:19.670 --> 00:08:24.189
Now what we know, everything I told you comes
00:08:24.189 --> 00:08:27.750
from four things. And the floor under it is a
00:08:27.750 --> 00:08:33.580
little thin. First class, around the year 1300,
00:08:33.820 --> 00:08:38.179
16 years after. Someone put a window in the market
00:08:38.179 --> 00:08:41.120
church at Hamlin showing the piper and the children.
00:08:42.519 --> 00:08:45.440
It stood there for three and a half centuries
00:08:45.440 --> 00:08:51.399
and it was destroyed by 1660. And we only know
00:08:51.399 --> 00:08:54.480
what it was because people had copied it down
00:08:54.480 --> 00:08:58.539
and it was still there. A man in colored clothes.
00:08:58.889 --> 00:09:07.149
children around him, the hill. 16 years. That's
00:09:07.149 --> 00:09:12.110
the gap between the event and the memorial. Close
00:09:12.110 --> 00:09:15.269
enough that people who were alive that day were
00:09:15.269 --> 00:09:20.429
alive when it went in and looked at it, and said
00:09:20.429 --> 00:09:25.450
nothing to correct it. Somebody paid for that
00:09:25.450 --> 00:09:29.009
window. Glass was cheap and the church glass
00:09:29.009 --> 00:09:36.009
was commissioned. Buddy. Somebody in Hamlin decided
00:09:36.009 --> 00:09:38.730
that this was the thing the church should show.
00:09:39.090 --> 00:09:43.429
And other people, they agreed. And it stayed
00:09:43.429 --> 00:09:49.070
up through 360 years of services. Weddings and
00:09:49.070 --> 00:09:53.750
funerals until it was gone. The second is a line
00:09:53.750 --> 00:09:59.490
in the town chronicle. written in 1384. It says
00:09:59.490 --> 00:10:02.169
it's been 100 years since the children left,
00:10:02.450 --> 00:10:09.070
and that's the entire entry. The third is the
00:10:09.070 --> 00:10:13.929
Nuremberg's manuscript, from around 1440 to 1450,
00:10:14.509 --> 00:10:18.389
which gives the date and the feast day, the piper
00:10:18.389 --> 00:10:21.190
in many colors and the number and the place of
00:10:21.190 --> 00:10:26.259
execution. And the fourth, the fourth is stone.
00:10:27.500 --> 00:10:31.919
In 1556, Tom built the new gate and carved it
00:10:31.919 --> 00:10:36.159
into it, and it stood for 270 years after the
00:10:36.159 --> 00:10:42.639
sorcerer let 130 children out. In 1602, the front
00:10:42.639 --> 00:10:46.139
of the house went up with the same date, the
00:10:46.139 --> 00:10:50.320
same number, the same man in his colored clothes,
00:10:50.860 --> 00:10:55.259
and the flat statement that a... They disappeared
00:10:55.259 --> 00:11:01.500
forever. And that, that is the whole evidentiary
00:11:01.500 --> 00:11:05.659
basis. A destroyed window, a one -line chronicle
00:11:05.659 --> 00:11:11.059
entry in a manuscript and some masonry. An unfortunate
00:11:11.059 --> 00:11:15.019
position. Certainly for anyone who wants a conclusion.
00:11:15.899 --> 00:11:20.889
And yet... Every one of those sources spread
00:11:20.889 --> 00:11:26.789
across 325 years and four different materials
00:11:26.789 --> 00:11:34.330
agrees on the date. The 26th of June. The Feast
00:11:34.330 --> 00:11:41.850
of Saints John and Paul. 1284. Hmm. Towns invent
00:11:41.850 --> 00:11:45.740
things all the time. Towns do not usually keep
00:11:45.740 --> 00:11:54.620
the same appointment for three centuries. Hmm,
00:11:55.379 --> 00:11:59.580
the evidence. The strongest evidence in this
00:11:59.580 --> 00:12:02.299
case isn't on the document, it's the street.
00:12:03.279 --> 00:12:06.080
It runs through the old town and it's called
00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:10.799
Buja Nastrasse. And the name means roughly the
00:12:10.799 --> 00:12:14.360
street without drums. The children were soon
00:12:14.360 --> 00:12:17.340
to have walked around this road all their way
00:12:17.340 --> 00:12:21.419
to the East Gate. And for centuries in that one
00:12:21.419 --> 00:12:26.720
street, Hamlet did not permit music. No drums,
00:12:27.059 --> 00:12:31.100
no dancing, no playing. It's a wedding party
00:12:31.100 --> 00:12:33.840
come through, fell silent at one end and picked
00:12:33.840 --> 00:12:37.500
up on the other. A funeral procession went through
00:12:37.500 --> 00:12:42.620
with one note. It's a strange kind of evidence.
00:12:43.159 --> 00:12:47.179
It's not a story. A story is cheap and story
00:12:47.179 --> 00:12:52.019
drifts one way or the other. This is more enforcement.
00:12:53.659 --> 00:12:56.799
The town made a rule and they kept the rule and
00:12:56.799 --> 00:12:59.259
passed the rule to the children who passed it
00:12:59.259 --> 00:13:02.179
to their children in a thing that happened to
00:13:02.179 --> 00:13:09.539
people none of them had ever met. Silence maintained
00:13:09.539 --> 00:13:16.240
by ordinance. For hundreds of years and 150 yards
00:13:16.240 --> 00:13:21.279
of road, a town does not do that to a legend.
00:13:23.039 --> 00:13:27.860
That's how a town treats a grave. And the rule
00:13:27.860 --> 00:13:30.659
doesn't protect the memory of the children, it
00:13:30.659 --> 00:13:38.299
bans the thing that took them. Hamlin did not
00:13:38.299 --> 00:13:42.360
forget the celebration on that street. Hamlin
00:13:42.360 --> 00:13:47.360
forbid the music. And the calendar in the gates
00:13:47.360 --> 00:13:52.840
because it was not one inscription. It was 1556
00:13:52.840 --> 00:13:57.639
and then 1602 and more besides, one facade after
00:13:57.639 --> 00:14:02.370
the other. The same date re -carved by generation
00:14:02.370 --> 00:14:05.129
after generation of people who could have let
00:14:05.129 --> 00:14:10.190
it go and they did not. Hamelin had every reason
00:14:10.190 --> 00:14:15.570
to stop. Nothing in this helped them. It was
00:14:15.570 --> 00:14:18.850
not good to trade to be the town that lost its
00:14:18.850 --> 00:14:23.629
children. There was no shrine and no relic. No
00:14:23.629 --> 00:14:28.809
pilgrim money in it. I kept saying it anyways.
00:14:29.950 --> 00:14:34.590
For seven hundred years. And they're still saying
00:14:34.590 --> 00:14:46.090
it now. Whatever happened on that road, the people
00:14:46.090 --> 00:14:48.610
who lived it never once behaved as it thought
00:14:48.610 --> 00:15:01.309
it had not. The shadows. The Piper, then. And
00:15:01.309 --> 00:15:06.669
here for once. I do not have to be careful. There's
00:15:06.669 --> 00:15:09.830
no family. There's no man who was suspected and
00:15:09.830 --> 00:15:14.750
just never charged. There is nobody alive who
00:15:14.750 --> 00:15:20.190
can hurt by me saying the thing out loud. Hmm,
00:15:20.230 --> 00:15:24.000
you've been given a monster. He hunched things
00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:28.299
in rags, a crooked flute, and a face built to
00:15:28.299 --> 00:15:34.559
frighten children. Just put it away. It was never
00:15:34.559 --> 00:15:39.740
there. He is described in the same way in every
00:15:39.740 --> 00:15:44.460
source. Across 300 years. And the description
00:15:44.460 --> 00:15:47.720
does not vary. Young and handsome and well dressed
00:15:47.720 --> 00:15:53.190
in many colors. The detail is not decoration
00:15:53.190 --> 00:15:58.710
in the 13th century. Motley, cloth maybe mixed
00:15:58.710 --> 00:16:02.830
in divided colors, was worn by people who stood
00:16:02.830 --> 00:16:07.009
outside the ordinary order of things. Players
00:16:07.009 --> 00:16:11.129
and gestures and the traveling in the unplaceable.
00:16:12.570 --> 00:16:15.409
A man in motley was marked as neither one thing
00:16:15.409 --> 00:16:17.950
nor the other and every single account of it
00:16:17.950 --> 00:16:24.440
leads with it. He does not speak. None of the
00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:26.940
earliest versions does he say a single word.
00:16:28.159 --> 00:16:30.960
He makes no demand and he issues no threat and
00:16:30.960 --> 00:16:37.159
offers no terms. He is not frightening. He is
00:16:37.159 --> 00:16:43.220
beautiful, rich, which is worse. And he did not
00:16:43.220 --> 00:16:45.879
have to raise his voice because he never needed
00:16:45.879 --> 00:16:50.909
anything the adults at all had. The instrument
00:16:50.909 --> 00:16:56.289
is silver, which is not what a traveling piper
00:16:56.289 --> 00:17:00.389
in 1284 is carrying. A working musician would
00:17:00.389 --> 00:17:03.990
have had wood. Silver is the medal of churches
00:17:03.990 --> 00:17:07.390
and reliquaries, and the things that you are
00:17:07.390 --> 00:17:10.009
not supposed to touch, and yet in there it is
00:17:10.009 --> 00:17:14.670
the day he chose. Midsummer is the end of the
00:17:14.670 --> 00:17:18.789
year. The point where the light stops climbing
00:17:18.789 --> 00:17:23.630
and starts to go. Every culture that's ever lived
00:17:23.630 --> 00:17:28.910
at this latitude is treated as a threshold. A
00:17:28.910 --> 00:17:31.450
night when the wall between things is supposed
00:17:31.450 --> 00:17:35.630
to be thin. He didn't come in February. He came
00:17:35.630 --> 00:17:38.529
in the one evening in the calendar when the whole
00:17:38.529 --> 00:17:41.369
town was outside and the boundary was already
00:17:41.369 --> 00:17:47.759
open. You see, he crosses running water to get
00:17:47.759 --> 00:17:52.119
in. He arrives at the exact end of the year at
00:17:52.119 --> 00:17:58.240
Midsummer on feast day. He plays once. He is
00:17:58.240 --> 00:18:01.160
answered only by children and all the children
00:18:01.160 --> 00:18:05.079
and by nothing else in town. He takes them past
00:18:05.079 --> 00:18:10.339
the gallows. Not up the pretty hill. Past the
00:18:10.339 --> 00:18:13.720
place where the town killed people Over a ground
00:18:13.720 --> 00:18:16.000
that everybody in Hamelin already understood
00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:20.680
to be grounds who don't go on Then the road ends
00:18:20.680 --> 00:18:26.799
and there's nothing Later tellings soften it
00:18:26.799 --> 00:18:30.240
They give him a mountain that opens and closes
00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:33.740
They give him three children left behind one
00:18:33.740 --> 00:18:37.880
lame one blind one deaf And somebody survives
00:18:37.880 --> 00:18:40.839
to explain it. So the story has a witness of
00:18:40.839 --> 00:18:43.700
the audience and it has a mercy. And the oldest
00:18:43.700 --> 00:18:46.220
version has no survivors and no explanation.
00:18:47.880 --> 00:18:52.039
It is a stranger and a sound and an empty road.
00:19:02.269 --> 00:19:04.890
Regeneration is trying to solve this and the
00:19:04.890 --> 00:19:09.150
two explanations are Genuinely good. The best
00:19:09.150 --> 00:19:14.130
is immigration In the 13th century that German
00:19:14.130 --> 00:19:19.190
lands were pushing east into Moronia, Paraninia,
00:19:19.670 --> 00:19:22.970
Transylvania, Brandenburg and the recruiters
00:19:22.970 --> 00:19:27.369
who ran it were in a location called No Kidders
00:19:28.319 --> 00:19:31.599
The locator arrived in a crowded town, promised
00:19:31.599 --> 00:19:34.240
land, and left with as many young people as he
00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:38.220
could sign. He was paid to be persuasive. He
00:19:38.220 --> 00:19:41.680
dressed well, because the cross -breast was his
00:19:41.680 --> 00:19:49.839
job. And the children of Hamlin? Hm. No, they
00:19:49.839 --> 00:19:53.359
may never admit children at all. could have been
00:19:53.359 --> 00:19:55.940
the town's people, its sons and its daughters,
00:19:56.299 --> 00:19:59.500
the way we still go and stay the sons of a place.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:06.440
So... A well -dressed stranger arrives, makes
00:20:06.440 --> 00:20:10.740
an offer, and leaves with 130 of the young, and
00:20:10.740 --> 00:20:16.119
they go east. And they're never heard from again,
00:20:16.579 --> 00:20:19.779
because in 1284, going east is functionally the
00:20:19.779 --> 00:20:25.359
same as... dying. And nobody comes back to see
00:20:25.359 --> 00:20:30.680
how it turned out. That fits almost everything.
00:20:31.700 --> 00:20:34.359
It fits the clothes, and the number, and the
00:20:34.359 --> 00:20:38.420
direction, and the complete silence afterwards.
00:20:39.980 --> 00:20:43.200
It's not only plausible, there's evidence, and
00:20:43.200 --> 00:20:46.099
evidence is better than the theory even deserves.
00:20:47.940 --> 00:20:52.789
A linguist named Jürgen Judith Took Evgeny's
00:20:52.789 --> 00:20:56.089
family name and recorded it in Hamelin. At the
00:20:56.089 --> 00:20:58.589
time, he went looking for those names somewhere
00:20:58.589 --> 00:21:02.609
else. He found them clustered with what he called
00:21:02.609 --> 00:21:06.970
amazing frequency. In Pregnance, in Ukra Marka,
00:21:07.069 --> 00:21:10.089
North of Berlin, and again that was Pomerania,
00:21:10.329 --> 00:21:15.089
is now owned. And then he did the same thing
00:21:15.089 --> 00:21:20.990
with places. There is a burvagan south of Hamelin.
00:21:21.369 --> 00:21:25.809
There is a Peruvian northwest of Berlin. There
00:21:25.809 --> 00:21:30.829
is a Peruvian near Stuttgart in Poland. Five
00:21:30.829 --> 00:21:33.250
villages called Hindenburg run in a line from
00:21:33.250 --> 00:21:36.650
Westphalia to Pomerania. There are three separate
00:21:36.650 --> 00:21:40.390
eastern Spielbergs. Hommelspring sits behind
00:21:40.390 --> 00:21:43.230
St. Hamelin and Hommelspring sits in the Jügelmark,
00:21:43.789 --> 00:21:51.579
400 miles away. Hmm. The news went east. Somebody.
00:21:52.619 --> 00:21:57.440
Somebody carried them. The timing works well.
00:21:58.279 --> 00:22:02.740
The Danes lost that Bahamian in 1227. The land
00:22:02.740 --> 00:22:05.319
south of the Baltic came open and the bishops
00:22:05.319 --> 00:22:07.640
and dukes of Pomerania and Brandenburg began
00:22:07.640 --> 00:22:12.240
sending locators out to fill them. Thousands
00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:16.019
of young adults from Lower Saxony and West Valley
00:22:16.019 --> 00:22:20.950
haunted exactly this period. Back in Hamelin
00:22:20.950 --> 00:22:24.410
there was a town full of second zones with no
00:22:24.410 --> 00:22:28.829
land coming. There is an even darker version
00:22:28.829 --> 00:22:32.690
of it. Some have suggested the young Hamelins
00:22:32.690 --> 00:22:37.450
were not recruited but sold, handed to a poultice
00:22:37.450 --> 00:22:40.849
agent. Which would explain why no town on earth
00:22:40.849 --> 00:22:42.890
would write down what actually had happened to
00:22:42.890 --> 00:22:48.559
them. The second is a children's crusade. one
00:22:48.559 --> 00:22:52.119
of the recurring waves of religious enthusiasm
00:22:52.119 --> 00:22:54.660
that pulled the young out of the European towns
00:22:54.660 --> 00:22:57.079
and marched them off to be sold or drowned or
00:22:57.079 --> 00:23:05.779
lost. And then, the weaker ones. Hmm. Plague.
00:23:07.180 --> 00:23:11.460
Plague, which, hmm, does not work, because the
00:23:11.460 --> 00:23:15.900
Black Death is 60 years out. A landslide on...
00:23:15.839 --> 00:23:19.940
a dancing mania of the sort that did sweep the
00:23:19.940 --> 00:23:24.380
Rhino and drowning in the Weezer. Each of them
00:23:24.380 --> 00:23:27.980
explains part of it. None of them explained why
00:23:27.980 --> 00:23:30.779
a town would encode a recruitment drive in a
00:23:30.779 --> 00:23:34.940
stained glass window and forbid music on a stream
00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:39.359
for 400 years because of an economic migration.
00:23:41.500 --> 00:23:45.829
If your sons and daughters... Sign a contract
00:23:45.829 --> 00:23:50.369
and walk east to take up farmland in Brandenburg
00:23:50.369 --> 00:23:53.869
It's a hard year and a lot of empty chairs. It's
00:23:53.869 --> 00:23:57.750
not a thing you can carve into a gate in 1556
00:23:57.750 --> 00:24:01.490
It's not a thing you put in a church. You do
00:24:01.490 --> 00:24:08.650
not ban dancing over immigration So we have a
00:24:08.650 --> 00:24:13.069
shelf of theories that account for The disappearance,
00:24:13.529 --> 00:24:19.029
and not one of them accounts for the town, which
00:24:19.029 --> 00:24:27.970
is, I suppose, less than ideal. 700 years of
00:24:27.970 --> 00:24:31.589
scholarship, and the best way we can say is that
00:24:31.589 --> 00:24:35.490
130 children left by a gate and something about
00:24:35.490 --> 00:24:43.950
it was worth banning music over. That families
00:24:43.950 --> 00:24:49.230
fight There is no family in this episode There
00:24:49.230 --> 00:24:51.730
is a town and the town has been fighting for
00:24:51.730 --> 00:24:57.410
700 years And it's been fighting a very very
00:24:57.410 --> 00:25:00.710
specific thing. It has been fighting the absence
00:25:00.710 --> 00:25:07.430
of a reason The earliest sources give this them
00:25:07.430 --> 00:25:13.210
a man He played, the children went, nothing forward,
00:25:13.490 --> 00:25:17.490
nothing explaining it. No grievance and no provocation.
00:25:18.230 --> 00:25:20.609
A hundred and thirty children taken for no cause
00:25:20.609 --> 00:25:27.930
at all. The town did nothing wrong. Nobody can
00:25:27.930 --> 00:25:34.990
live inside that. Somewhere in the 16th century
00:25:34.990 --> 00:25:42.130
the rats appear. The first mention of them comes
00:25:42.130 --> 00:25:47.930
in 1559, 275 years after the fact, which has
00:25:47.930 --> 00:25:51.269
coined a long time to sit in an unpaid invoice.
00:25:52.869 --> 00:25:57.009
Somebody, somebody found it. Somebody filed it.
00:25:57.230 --> 00:26:01.849
Somebody decided in the range of the Charles
00:26:01.849 --> 00:26:06.130
V that what the whole business had been missing
00:26:06.130 --> 00:26:11.140
was simply a receipt. The rat comes with a contract.
00:26:11.740 --> 00:26:14.980
With the contract comes a fee. With the fee comes
00:26:14.980 --> 00:26:18.460
a town council that refuses to pay it. And with
00:26:18.460 --> 00:26:24.019
that refusal, finally, at long last, comes...
00:26:24.019 --> 00:26:29.480
a reason. It makes the piper man with the motive
00:26:29.480 --> 00:26:32.980
instead of thing with none It makes a loss consequence
00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:35.059
instead of an accident and it makes the town
00:26:35.059 --> 00:26:38.079
guilty which sounds like the worst outcome and
00:26:38.079 --> 00:26:42.660
is In fact the most comforting one available
00:26:42.660 --> 00:26:47.799
Because guilt means agency and guilt means We
00:26:47.799 --> 00:26:50.680
could have prevented it guilt means it will not
00:26:50.680 --> 00:26:53.700
happen to you. So as long as you pay what you
00:26:53.700 --> 00:27:03.220
owe The rats were not a decoration on this story.
00:27:04.259 --> 00:27:07.660
They were a defense against it. And they were
00:27:07.660 --> 00:27:11.500
sitting right there to be picked up. Hamlin was
00:27:11.500 --> 00:27:15.119
a milling town on a river, which means Hamlin
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:19.279
had rats, which means Hamlin had rat catchers.
00:27:20.619 --> 00:27:23.220
And a rat catcher is a man that you admire and
00:27:23.220 --> 00:27:27.640
you haggle with and try not to overpay. The town
00:27:27.640 --> 00:27:30.680
took the most ordinary transaction in its own
00:27:30.680 --> 00:27:33.759
daily life and welded it into the worst day in
00:27:33.759 --> 00:27:45.380
history. And the joint held for 400 years. Hanuman
00:27:45.380 --> 00:27:49.579
was handed over and spent three centuries building
00:27:49.579 --> 00:27:53.619
a door onto it. And the door has a moral on it.
00:27:53.660 --> 00:27:57.750
And the moral is sell your debts. So yes, the
00:27:57.750 --> 00:28:04.710
town owed a bill. And something, something terrible
00:28:04.710 --> 00:28:09.730
came and collected. The rest of it's even worse.
00:28:11.789 --> 00:28:15.990
Nobody, nobody in 1284 ever said what the bill
00:28:15.990 --> 00:28:21.049
was for. There's no contract anywhere in the
00:28:21.049 --> 00:28:25.490
record. There's no fee, there's no service rendered,
00:28:25.650 --> 00:28:30.509
and there's no name on the invoice. It was drawn
00:28:30.509 --> 00:28:36.730
up to 175 years after the payment had already
00:28:36.730 --> 00:28:42.089
been taken by men who were not born when it happened
00:28:42.089 --> 00:28:45.589
to account for a charge that nobody could explain
00:28:45.589 --> 00:28:49.039
and nobody could even bear. They did not pay
00:28:49.039 --> 00:28:52.180
the piper. They paid first and then at their
00:28:52.180 --> 00:29:04.319
leisure. They wrote the bill I have spent this
00:29:04.319 --> 00:29:11.859
hour Taking the rats away from them and it leaves
00:29:11.859 --> 00:29:16.009
a hundred and thirty children with No names,
00:29:16.349 --> 00:29:20.230
no ages, no faces, and no reason. I walked out
00:29:20.230 --> 00:29:25.250
of the gate in the summer of 1284. My beautiful
00:29:25.250 --> 00:29:28.309
young man in colored clothes who wanted nothing
00:29:28.309 --> 00:29:31.410
and said nothing and was never seen before or
00:29:31.410 --> 00:29:36.670
after. Hmm, the bedtime version is just kinder.
00:29:37.210 --> 00:29:40.349
The bedtime version at least has a lesson in
00:29:40.349 --> 00:29:49.039
it. Hmm. I took the lesson out. The only thing
00:29:49.039 --> 00:29:53.000
I can say for that is that it is what Hamlin
00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:57.619
said first, before anyone tidied it, when there
00:29:57.619 --> 00:30:00.579
was still someone alive who had been standing
00:30:00.579 --> 00:30:10.160
in that street. Hmm, the street. The street is
00:30:10.160 --> 00:30:17.559
still there. Bunjilastras. It still runs through
00:30:17.559 --> 00:30:20.319
the old town, and the buildings along it haven't
00:30:20.319 --> 00:30:23.339
changed. The ordinance has gone, and the tour
00:30:23.339 --> 00:30:25.559
groups come through it now, with thousands of
00:30:25.559 --> 00:30:30.880
the guide talking the whole way. Rottenthanger
00:30:30.880 --> 00:30:35.500
House is still standing, and the inscription
00:30:35.500 --> 00:30:39.400
is still in front of it, and it still pays 130
00:30:39.400 --> 00:30:44.509
children. and it still says that they've disappeared
00:30:44.509 --> 00:30:50.369
forever. The window is gone and burned or fell
00:30:50.369 --> 00:30:54.809
or was broken out sometime before 1660. And all
00:30:54.809 --> 00:30:57.410
that's left is a copy of a copy of something
00:30:57.410 --> 00:31:00.349
that a man once drew while standing in front
00:31:00.349 --> 00:31:04.470
of a church. Looking up at a piece of colored
00:31:04.470 --> 00:31:09.049
glass that somebody's something paid for. 16
00:31:09.049 --> 00:31:11.950
years after, while it was still fresh enough
00:31:11.950 --> 00:31:17.750
to, hmm, remember... The wester still runs past
00:31:17.750 --> 00:31:21.470
the town. The gates are gone, and the rural east
00:31:21.470 --> 00:31:24.950
is the rural east. And there are towns at the
00:31:24.950 --> 00:31:27.269
far end of it where family names are the ones
00:31:27.269 --> 00:31:33.529
that used to be in... Hamlin. Nobody in either
00:31:33.529 --> 00:31:39.019
place thinks about it. The execution ground is
00:31:39.019 --> 00:31:41.839
not marked. Nothing stands where the trail stops.
00:31:43.279 --> 00:31:46.000
You could walk over this afternoon and not know.
00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:49.819
Which is true most of the ground any of us walk
00:31:49.819 --> 00:31:55.640
over today. And every June 26th, an animalman,
00:31:55.640 --> 00:31:59.559
they put on the play. They dress a man in motley
00:31:59.559 --> 00:32:03.140
and give him a pint. And the children of the
00:32:03.140 --> 00:32:06.019
town following through the streets laughing in
00:32:06.019 --> 00:32:10.579
costume for the visitors out through the town
00:32:10.579 --> 00:32:23.839
The way they went 742 years and the town Still
00:32:23.839 --> 00:32:27.259
can't stop seeing and it still does not know
00:32:27.259 --> 00:32:32.109
what it's saying a stranger came In midsummer,
00:32:33.089 --> 00:32:40.490
he played once, and Hamlin has been playing ever
00:32:40.490 --> 00:32:41.069
since.